Golden Oldie

Tuesday 19 September 2000 23:00 BST

When I met Howard Hawks, in the middle of the Sixties, he was nearly 70 - and still piloting his own light aircraft. Yes, he admitted ruefully, he did have to take air-worthiness tests these days, but he'd found a way of getting round 'em without actually cheating. How come? I asked. The leathery face looked foxy. 'Got all the glass in the instrument panel replaced with magnifyin' stuff. Could see 'em then.'

He lived on for another 12 years. In the course of his long life, he made just about every kind of film: comedies, gangsters, private eyes, musicals, Westerns... which is possibly why he's not paid due attention today. Diversity is not an admission ticket to the cinema Pantheon. Todd McCarthy, Variety's sharp film critic, couldn't even find a British publisher a few years ago for what should be a definitive study of Hawks. John Ford is remembered for his Westerns; Hitchcock for his suspense thrillers; Hawks isn't exactly forgotten, but there's too much of him to remember.

Only Angels Have Wings, made in 1939, shows his virtues in a genre that Hollywood now usually does badly, when it does it at all - namely the 'woman in a man's world' comedy-drama. Remember the hash it made of Six Days, Seven Nights: Harrison Ford and Anne Heche stranded on a desert island, getting together by her yanking a flare gun out of his shorts and him pulling a snake out of hers. Hawks wouldn't have needed those indignities to get things going.

Jean Arthur walks into the lonely mail-plane outpost in Ecuador in Only Angels Have Wings. Immediately you know that she and Cary Grant, playing the chief who sends his postmen pilots off in old crates to their likely deaths flying through fang-toothed gaps in the Andes, will hit it off - though not before hitting each other with their tongues, and possibly their fists. Molly Haskell, America's foremost feminist critic, has said that the 'feminine' side of Hawks's women, which makes men fear them at first as debilitating or weakening influences on male bonding, 'is gradually welcomed as a crucial element in adult men's lives'. It is certainly what keeps Only Angels Have Wings from being a misogynist film. Arthur - playing a stranded showgirl, if you please - gradually imposes herself on the high-risk world of men who don't obey any ground rules: the film is a great thriller when in the air, but also a rollercoaster sex comedy when she and Grant are at it hammer and tongs.

Grant himself is simply great: an irresistible man's man, possibly Hawks's idealised view of himself, yet aware that a man's world isn't complete without a woman in it. He hides his softer side as he bides his time, but even his bark has the love-bite of a snatched kiss. Seeing him tuck into the dinner laid for a flyer who's fatally crashed before he could lift knife and fork, Arthur protests: 'That's his steak you're eating!' Comes the reply that no one who sees Only Angels Have Wings ever forgets. 'So whaddya expect me to do with it - stuff it?' Romance, after that, is inevitable.